Dynamic Reconfiguration of Safety-Critical Systems: Automation and Human Involvement

Abstract This thesis describes the design and evaluation of a novel Decision Support System (DSS) for naturalistic, safety-critical decisions on-board modern aircraft. The system is intended to improve pilots’ decision-making accuracy and performance, by supporting human cognitive strategies. In recent years, the development of dynamically reconfigurable Safety-Critical Manned Systems (SCMS) has acquired increasing attention in several engineering domains including civil and military aerospace, marine and ground transportation. Dynamic reconfiguration of the on-board control systems enables adaptation to the changing conditions during operation. At the occurrence of a fault or damage, reconfiguration allows for the transition to a degraded operating mode by deactivating a number of services in order to preserve sufficient resources for the provision of essential functionality. The current focus of mainstream research is on full autonomy and full authority solutions, which nonetheless make the transition to a degraded mode transparent to the operator, as much as possible. This thesis takes a different approach, developing a human-centred perspective: by drawing on well-established fields such as Cognitive Engineering, Human Factors and Naturalistic Decision Making, it identifies limitations of fully automated dynamic reconfiguration solutions, including some safety problems, and proposes novel technology to keep the operator much more effectively “in the control loop” during reconfiguration. A review of the relevant literature leads to the identification of three main research problems: (a) determining the characteristics of effective decision support information for SCMS dynamic reconfiguration decisions; (b) developing DSS technology to autonomously generate the type…